From ...
From: Erik Naggum
Subject: Re: Follow up to "New To Lisp: Advantages of Lisp syntax"
Date: 1999/06/21
Message-ID: <3138961746451885@naggum.no>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 492094364
References: <7kjp0n$mg0$1@news7.svr.pol.co.uk>
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Organization: Naggum Software; +47 8800 8879; http://www.naggum.no
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
* "Jonathan"
| A few weeks ago I posted a question asking experienced Lisp programmers
| what the advantages of Lisp's (very non-standard) prefix syntax are.
I'm curious why you still use "standard" about syntaxes.
| You use a lot of parentheses in Lisp, but you can mostly ignore them and
| read by the indenting. Whereas in C++, where parens are disambiguators,
| you have to read them very carefully. I've seen this be a major source
| of bugs for people, and it's a major hazard in porting and code
| maintenance (there's no guarantee that even the same vendor will keep the
| same precendence hierarchy forever outside of the relationships defined
| by the ansi standard).
this is an important observation. I mused that parens translate to pain
in Algol-like languages, culminating in C++, and that when people see
parens in Lisp, they _feel_ the excruciating pain from C++. now, we are
not all blessed with growing up with good parens, and psychotic parens
can have a dramatic effect on one's development, but most people realize
that it's the _particular_ parens that are good or bad, not all parens.
welcome to the world of good parens, Jonathan!
#:Erik
--
@1999-07-22T00:37:33Z -- pi billion seconds since the turn of the century